Recent Comments by

BTK

They voted for it. Take all their property and put them to work in the salt mines. Lets just stop all this pretending that the Democratic Party believes in capitalism and go straight to Dr. Zhivago. Maybe then their guilt over being wealthy will finally be assuaged enough that they stop screwing the rest of us. The guillotine would be too fair for those traitors. But in reality they'll just move out of state and keep voting liberal until their new home is a dystopian hellhole too.

Your coverage today has been absolutely abysmal. You've had no info all day. My twitter feed is more informative with stats from various county offices, the campaigns etc, have had to turn to huffington and other lackluster sites for a news fix. This is exactly the type of news bi excells at, small bitesize updates. You missed a big opportunity to shine today.

Agree 100% with the comments here. This is why the lines aren't buried, because consumers aren't willing to pay for the extra expense in their utility bills. But if that is the case you shouldn't be willing to pay for the same extra expense as a result of the 80% green mandate Obama is pitching.

And the argument that "well, Switzerland has all ITS lines buried" is specious and immature. So you're saying an area smaller than NYCs metro area with 40% of the worlds financial institutions and a smaller population than Birmingham, AL can afford to bury all its lines? Amazing! Lets see you bury the lines for 330mm people in a country as large as ours.

Glad you asked. The money went to shoring up state budgets so teachers and school administrators didnt have to start contributing to their own healthcare and retirements. Almost none was spent on infrastructure improvement because of heinous government union and green lobby requirements which are impossible to meet in a timely fashion. As emperor Obama joked, "I guess the projects weren't as shovel ready as we thought."

I'm glad wasting a trillion dollars and putting every American man woman and child a further thirty thousand dollars in debt is a laughing matter.

The Economist is a conservative rag? Hahaha. They forsake every day their duty to economics in favor of their duty to liberalism. Their every article their every breath is dedicated to the advancement of global carbon sequestration and "income disparity reduction" read: socialism. That they still call themselves the economist is in itself an embarrassment. Their endorsement means less than nothing.

Why do you people persist in this folly, are you so shortsighted and historically ignorant? They tried this. Redistribution for redistribution's sake has been tried and tried and tried again. It never works, it just kills the economy and makes everyone poorer.

Do you arrogant pedantic leftist journalists and academics really fancy yourselves so much smarter than the Bolsheviks? They had the finest philosophers and engineers and political scientists of Western Europe and the world contributing to their experiment. They had a country filled to overflowing with natural resources, and ideological purity when it comes to your beloved idea of redistributive social justice. There were no irksome "obstructionist Republicans" to stop them. What were their results? Economic misery for all of their people. So too with every other communist government.

And don't give me that bs pander about how liberal democrats aren't socialists. Redistribution is the heart and soul of socialism, it is the only policy that differentiates socialism from any other form of economic organization. The media persists in this lie that there is a difference with such vehemence that even conservatives wrongly concede the point.

Redistribution ultimately hurts the people you want to help. The standard of living our poor enjoy puts them in the top .0001% wealth bracket of all the people who've ever existed in the history of the world. A quality of life they can only enjoy as a result of the economic system you so detest.

This is a new low in journalistic malpractice. How fundamentally dishonest can you get.

So apparently, despite that all the policies he has stated have a goal (and economic effect, key difference from Obama's policies) of reducing energy prices, his goal, according to this, is actually to increase energy prices. Because, and this is really a compelling piece of evidence, someone somewhere wrote a book about raising oil prices that has nothing whatsoever to do with Romney?

In fact, raising oil prices is Obama's stated policy. So you may as well attribute all of Obama's "raise energy prices to go green" schtick to Romney as well. Anything else you'd like to add on, how about slavery? I hear someone somewhere in America once upon a time wrote about that, that's probably Romney's policy too according to this logic.

I am not a subscriber to FT because I always see borderline socialist article titles, good to see I am not missing any insightful analysis, or even any journalism.

Not half as misleading as Obama's ads. Romney killed my wife? $6,400 per senior lie, $5 trillion lie, taxes on middle class rising by $2k lie. This is the moral equivalent of a drone strike in response to 9/11.

What a joke. This isn't a defense of Obamas record it's a normative attack on Romney, exactly the same thing we get from Obamas campaign. I object vigorously to the use of graphs that are a % change basis rather than a total value basis. Because these graphs start "at recovery" namely after march 9, 2009, when stimulus had already been passed, they seem to show that government spending and employment was flat or down. Because they had increased both by 30% with the stimulus before these graphs start recording.

Sorry but increasing gov spending by a huge amount and then recording percentage change in governent spending (oh down 3% off a 50% higher baseline, it must be a private sector led recovery!) is an extremely disingenuous and misleading argument to make. These same charts as a % of total value and starting in 2008 look diametrically opposite of what's presented here. These are the kind of charts that would make a firm like T2 lose the ability to claim GIPS compliance if they used them in an investor presentation. Whit knows this, and he knows better than to think this is a strong recovery. But he lets his limousine liberal religion of affluent guilt overrule his economic science, exactly the way he hypocritically accuses the GOP of doing on global warming. Obamas "recovery" has been a dramatic underperform by any measure you care to take.

Really, stabs him in the back? I guess that's because Obama is entitled to the endorsement of every media outlet? You'd certainly think so the way the state media promotes him. Read what you wrote and I promise in one year you'll be embarrassed at what a partisan hack you sound like. Your every breath gives Obama the benefit of the doubt and discredits even factual evidence against him.

His policies didn't have anything to do with slowing the recovery Henry? I know somewhere along the line in prepping to be a wall st analyst you read at least the most fundamental of economics textbooks. Every stroke of Obamas pen has increased dead weight cost, reduced and redistributed net economic surplus. Reducing GDP and impoverishing America is Obamas stated goal.

And by the way the recession he inherited was caused by the democrats who ruled congress from 2006 onwards, rejected Bush's 17 appeals to reform Fannie/Freddie and blew the federal fisc out of this world.

You can carry Democrat water all you want but you can't make the country drink.

Slide 14 is a perfect example of why this president kills jobs and economic opportunity with ruthless efficiency. Their goal is to reduce college tuition. The first 2 points of their 3 point plan would do exactly the opposite. Extending tax credits and increasing work study give families more resources to pay for tuition which makes paying high tuition less painful which means...tuition rises even faster! The only way to reduce it is through consumer choice, when people start electing to go to cheaper schools because they don't see the value in a 55k a year degree, those schools will be forced to reduce their tuition.

Subsidies and pell grants are the reason tuition rises as fast as it does. The same reason healthcare costs rise faster than inflation, because consumers think they are spending someone else's money. The same reason, by the way, that real estate rose as preciptiously as it did, subsidies and tax code distortion. Why these intellectual children don't understand this basic concept is beyond me.

Not to mention they have UN observers "watching republicans" for signs of voter abuse. How about watching everyone or keeping your nose out of it you biased hacks?

I hope Tagg does have a back door switch in those polling machines, won't even come close to matching the voter fraud Obamas 100+ offices in every swing state are going to execute with AG Holder (a criminal himself) having overturned voter ID laws.

They agree that uncertainty tracks with low economic performance, but argue that it is caused by the low performance rather than the reverse, with no evidence to support that claim other than their heart felt limousine liberal guilt. Pretty weak for GS.

So because there is a correlation between "secrecy" read "not having the government constantly harassing you and making you spend millions on compliance" and accounting firms per capita, all accounting firms are not to be trusted. Great argument. And what the hell does this have to do with Romney? Can you really attack his tax returns when the head of the IRS that your god appointed is a literal tax cheat. Whereas the worst that can be said of Romney is he legally minimized his tax exposure?

Anyway there is a significant arbitrage opportunity on the gap in credibility between PWC and the tax justice center (sounds like something Hugo Chavez or Lenin would create) / a poli sci professor from a no name school who looks like one of the three stooges. Do us all a favor and stimulate the economy, stop cutting your own hair and go spend the ten bucks at super cuts. Thanks.

Having those assets to release into the market is an easy mechanism for the fed to use to remove the extra currency they have flushed into the economy by buying them in the first place. If they no longer have that lever to pull (because they have effectively torn up the loans) then taking that money back out of the economy becomes difficult to do without unwanted side effects (ie raising rates, gov issuing additional debt etc). It changes the effect of that currency from temporary to permanent. Permanent increase in m2 when velocity eventually comes back will result by definition in increased inflation.

This action would be immediately equivalent to printing the amount of dollars represented by the face value of the loans forgiven. Ignore the externality of irrevocably destroyed confidence in the dollar. Imagine the effect of literally printing a trillion dollars in one day. Flush the pill down the toilet neo.

Thanks for this article, very informative and it's tough to find out about his plans. Now I see why. Something like 50% of those slides were about raising taxes, the other 50% were about trying to centrally plan the economy by picking winners and losers through cronie capitalism/special interest lobbying. How does he think punishing oil companies is going to reduce energy prices or increase national energy security? Oh that's right, he doesn't care.

This plan is exactly what he has been doing the last four years which has delayed recovery, put millions of Americans out of work, and destroyed the economic future of our next generation. Specifically by reducing their lifetime earnings power and saddling them with monstrous new debt and unreformed bankrupt entitlement programs.